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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Which, raises a weird question.

If* a small chunk of plutonium can output 1.21GW, then $4.7B in spending seems extremely high, like multiple orders of magnitude high.

If that's the true cost of green electricity then I understand why conservatives have been bullish on the topic.

Though I'd rather use green alternatives and reduce power consumption overall, personally.

* Movie magic could be lying to us, I'm just running with the movie's idea.

EDIT: from cursory checking it seems like plutonium can output 8 gigawatts, holy shit.

EDIT2: Downvoted for asking a question. :\ is it because I said conservatives may have had a point? I can be wrong, don't downvote to disagree.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_... : 3.2GW (roughly three times that) for a construction cost of £20bn, or $28bn, roughly six times that. Plus subsidies throughout its life by the strike price mechanism. And that's just the construction cost, not the operating cost for staff and maintenance etc.

The original design claim was apparently £24/MWh. So the agreed subsidy price was £92.50/MWh.

U r doing a lot of double-counting here.

The strike price is high, and it is an implicit subsidy. But the construction cost is covered by the constructor. So u cant complain about both of them.

The 1.2GW of renewable runs at ~30% capacity. Nuclear is generally at 90%. So your 3.2GW nuclear is equivalent to 9.6GW renewable !!

Nuclear is too expensive, true, but you are paying for dispatch-ability. Do you want a 50% discount on electricity which only runs 70%/80%/90% of the time?

The 24/mwh was just a presentation slide. Yes, the UK got a shitty deal. But when negotiation started 10 years ago off-shore wind as 500% more expensive. And on-shore wind was banned by politicians.

I love the green stuff. It is cheaper. More scalable. It will win. But we need every nuclear reactor we can get.

/end runt

EDIT: The UK is also x10 more densely populated than the US. Metros such as London or Tokyo are an extra challenge for low-density renewables.

Hinkley Point C != All nuclear plants.

If you state this fallacy you should at least tell everyone the unique geological issues HPC is facing.

It's one that's actually getting built. Can you provide examples of ones that are actually being built and how they've controlled cost overruns?

What unique geological issues?

When countries build multiple nuclear power plants, instead of one at a time, costs are significantly lower. E.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

South Korea's nuclear plants are also much cheaper, for the same reason.

A typical nuclear power plant outputs (edit:) typically around 1-1.5 GW (electrical) per reactor.

"plutonium outputs 8 gigawatts" is meaningless without an amount, and without specifying if it's electrical or thermal output.

It's gigawatt-hours, and it's electrical.

Gigawatt-hours is energy, not power. Multiply power by number of hours the plant is running to get energy; but then you’d probably be interested in how many petawatt-hours it made.

Fun fact: the lifetime electrical energy output of the Neckarwestheim plant is approximately 30 kg by relativistic equivalence.

It's not like a chunk of plutonium just gives you 1.21GW in electricity you can plug into the grid. The fuel in nuclear is extremely cheap for the power it gives you. It's the rest of the system needed to safely extract that power and turn it into usable electricity that's expensive (whereas converting wind and solar to electricity is fairly cheap).

Well it was 1.21GW, but for how long? The lightning strike lasted what, 1/10th of a second? 121MJ. Plug a capacitor into a socket for a day and you're talking a 1.4KW draw.

> Plug a capacitor into a socket for a day and you're talking a 1.4KW draw.

Capacitors are reactive components and don't consume power.

Presumably they leak or heat up though to some degree?

Also known as equivalent series resistance. This should be very low for a decent capacitor in reasonable condition.

Capacitors consume power as they charge. Producing a 25 Farad capacitor that's stable at 1000 volts and can discharge in the required time is left as an exercise to the reader

> EDIT: from cursory checking it seems like plutonium outputs 8 gigawatts, holy shit.

A critical mass of plutonium will output just any imaginable amount of power your powerplant can handle.

…for a very small amount of time. Tsar Bomba (about 50 megatons of TNT) released about 58 TWh (according to Google, searching for “50 megaton TNT in twh”) in, I guess, less than a ms.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, you would need ten of those each day to cover the world’s energy needs (≈ double that to convert heat into motion, move it to users (who won’t want to live near the energy production facility, etc)

But a solar panel requires zero chunks of plutonium to produce electricity? So it's ahead on that metric? Nonsence as the metric may be.

> If* a small chunk of plutonium can output 1.21GW

How many tens of billions of dollars (of mostly taxpayer money) does it cost to build, run, and maintain a nuclear power plant?

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